


bloody right hand

by ronsenboobi (snewvilliurs)



Series: blood-thirsting carrion birds (and other stories) [2]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emotionally Repressed Ala Mhigans, Gen, Patch 4.1: The Legend Returns, Specific Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-25
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:00:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26647150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snewvilliurs/pseuds/ronsenboobi
Summary: set during the 4.1 quest "a blissful arrival." in the aftermath of ala mhigo's liberation, the woman they once called warrior of light seeks out a traitor for answers to lay the dead to rest.“Who killed him? You?”“Do you take me for an assassin, woman?” Laurentius asked, desperation turning his words into a whine.“I take you for a worm. Answer me.”
Series: blood-thirsting carrion birds (and other stories) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1938766
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	bloody right hand

**Author's Note:**

> this piece takes place midway through [chapter 13](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24665125/chapters/62164099) of _blood-thirsting carrion birds_ , an au where ilberd survives baelsar's wall. some of the context might be a little confusing if you haven't read it, but this is, above all, about wilred. i love to suffer and i hope you all do too, so enjoy!

Morgana stomped down from the ramparts with her fingers curled into her palms, gritting her teeth at Raubahn’s choice of locale for a conversation. 

The nights had grown colder since the liberation. It was easy to forget it while inside the city walls: their height broke bitter winds as they fell, and sun-soaked stone kept the chill at bay until morning—but upon the ramparts, there was no avoiding it. The Lochs unraveled below, shouldered by mountains and the sea of clouds.

At the edge of the world, artifice fell apart. Perhaps that was the reason Raubahn had brought Morgana up there—a military man’s tactical choice for a place where words would be at their starkest, where he could speak his intentions with honesty and have them met with the same.

Morgana had been gritting her teeth against what honesty she might have had for him. It would have been a lie to say she would be happy to shake his hand and send him on his way when came the time for him to crawl back to Ul’dah, and so she had said nothing. How could she pretend, at the edge of the world, when the wind pulled so bitterly at her?

She worked her anger into cold—her fists tight to warm her fingers, her jaw locked to keep her teeth from chattering—and the cold into another anger. More waited below than Raubahn’s lofty loyalty; Ala Mhigo pulled at her where Ul’dah never would again, even if the past sank into every cobblestone.

The Griffin’s chief collaborators, awaiting transportation and the Alliance’s trial—betrayers on Ala Mhigan soil. It made her sick with rage to even think it. Nausea lingered heavily in the pit of her belly as she wound through the streets towards the Resistance headquarters, but her jaw, at the very least, loosened as she saw Lyse hadn’t yet returned to the palace to oversee preparations for the summit.

“Commander,” she called, her voice too cold. She cleared her throat to soften her tone. “Might I have a word? Won’t be long.”

Lyse pulled herself away. “Is everything all right? You look more… tense than usual.”

The pause made Morgana snort. “Look at you, already becoming a diplomat,” she said—and the strange pride she felt watching Lyse take up these responsibilities neither of them had thought her suited for was not fabricated. “I’m fine. I need a favour.” Lyse nodded. “I’d like your permission to go down to the cells.”

“Why—to see Fordola?” Lyse asked. “I’ve already gone with Sairsel and Arenvald. I think she just needs time—”

“Not the Butcher. The traitor Braves they captured.”

For what little she’d seen of Lyse during the liberation campaign, what with her going off with Sairsel and the twins to carry the fight to Doma and taking up Conrad’s responsibilities so soon after coming back, Morgana often struggled to see the Yda she’d known in her—but at that, Lyse’s mouth shifted fleetingly into a curve so familiar that she may as well have had her eyes obscured by the mask. The past yet clung to her, too.

Morgana had never asked what she’d given up in the fight that night in Ul’dah, but she’d seen what she had lost on the Wall.

“Morgana, I don’t—” she began, only to stop herself with a sigh, her mouth curving again.

“I won’t touch them.”

Her mouth might give her a shade of the memory of Yda, but Lyse’s clever blue eyes were hers and hers alone. She had a way of understanding people that shocked Morgana for how well she’d managed to tamp it down to be someone she wasn’t.

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

“I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if I let them go to their deaths without at least trying to have some answers,” Morgana said. It was optimistic to think that their trial would end in execution, perhaps, but in this, she could allow herself to hope.

“All right—but please do keep your hands to yourself,” Lyse said, her authority uncertain around the edges. Likely she might not have dared to say it were it not for the mantle of commander, and Morgana respected that she had. “I don’t want our first official dealings with the Alliance to be handing off battered prisoners.”

Morgana nodded, saluting for good measure. “Aye, aye, Commander. I’ll be a good girl.”

Colour rose to Lyse’s cheeks. “Please don’t do that again,” she said in a flustered hiss. “Not you.”

“You’d best get used to a bit of subordination, lass,” Morgana said, smirking.

“I will. Eventually,” Lyse said with a wave of her hand, and those served as their parting words.

Morgana left a comradely tap on her arm in passing and made her way to the cells with the surety of an arrow. The guard on watch saluted at her approach, and didn’t even question her request to speak with the prisoners for the Alliance—they had seen her face in Rhalgr’s Reach, in Ala Ghiri, in Porta Praetoria; they had heard her name a hundred times before. Her request to Lyse had been unneeded, even if she found it necessary.

Some strange apprehension settled behind her ribs as the guard guided her to the proper cells; she lingered first in front of the lalafell’s, light catching on the golden gleam in his eyes as though they were coins—faded, but still metal. 

All those horrors, all those lives for something so small and vile as coin. Morgana swallowed back her disgust and shook her head, moving on to the next cell—and thinking all the while of Ilberd and bitter ironies. At the very least, he had bothered to commit the unforgivable for the sake of a cause—even if that cause was an Ala Mhigo left empty by his loss.

The guard eyed her, brief and wary, their keyring filling the silence. “I’ll have to leave the door open. Your safety and his—Commander’s orders.”

“It’s fine. I spoke to her,” Morgana said, stepping aside as the guard pulled the heavy cell door open. They nodded to her; she muttered a word of thanks and crossed the threshold.

Laurentius’ bones drew shadows on his thin shirt; he had lost weight since she had seen him last, during the Braves’ coup. Morgana wondered if it was the Griffin’s campaign that had worn him down, or its aftermath—but she could not fabricate any shred of sympathy for him, pathetic as he was curled up on his cot like a child. He looked over his shoulder wearily, then tensed with recognition.

“Do you remember me?” Morgana asked, sarcasm slipping into her voice as she recalled their first meeting: “The Ala Mhigan bitch.”

Laurentius sat up in one dizzy motion. Even in the low light, his face was pallid, bruised by the shadows on his cheeks and underneath his eyes—and he looked up with a desperate gaze that made her want to draw back as though it might snare her. She had expected unrepentance; not whatever this was.

“Warrior of Light—”

Her voice rose sharply. “I’m not Warrior of Light anymore. Your master saw to that.”

“You’re alive,” Laurentius said, as though it were a wonder. “He knew you’d come. We all knew you would. I don’t think he meant for you to come down from the Wall.”

“Of course he didn’t,” Morgana snapped.

“He’s dead, isn’t he? The primal…”

“He jumped. Split his skull laughing.”

Laurentius looked away at that, his frown carved deep into his face, and Morgana felt strangely relieved. Why was she afraid that he would see the lie in her eyes? If anyone could see that she spoke a wish rather than the truth—the ugly truth of Ilberd bleeding on the Royal Menagerie, chained under a theatre that was just as much an empty relic of times long lost as he was—it would be a fate-walker. The Butcher, locked in a cell of her own not a hundred feet away but silent under the weight of her own guilt, or Arenvald, as hesitant in his gift as he was in his own worth—or Ashelia Riot, whom Morgana would always choose to avoid if she could.

Or Sairsel. The thought of him seeing into her mind and memories scratched at her bones, pulled her apart; she gathered herself back together.

“I came here for answers,” she declared, and Laurentius wheezed out something like a laugh. “About the Braves.”

“What difference will it make?”

“That’s for me to know; I don’t give a shite whether you understand it.” Morgana paused, breathing once through her nose as she bit around the name. “Wilred Glasse. The boy who was murdered in the Shroud. It was your lot, wasn’t it?”

Laurentius nodded, silent.

“Why?”

“Isn’t it obvious? He knew. He’d found out the whole bloody thing—the money trail, the Monetarists’ hands so far up the Braves’ arse that we were spitting coins out like puppets. But he had to go and be a fool about it.”

Morgana frowned to urge him on.

“Went to the captain instead of the commander,” Laurentius explained, another breathy chuckle scratching its way up his chest. “Didn’t figure _that_ part out. That’s why you Ala Mhigans bloody keep getting yourselves killed—always so blind about your own.”

It was for Lyse’s sake that Morgana kept her feet rooted to the spot—but she couldn’t keep the threat from her voice. “Is that a smart thing to laugh about while you’re in a cell in Ala Mhigo, do you think?”

Laurentius’ shoulders drew in; his spark of bitter arrogance was nothing more than that. He pulled his feet up onto the cot, rubbing at the patchy stubble growing on his cheeks with his palm.

“Who killed him? You?”

“Do you take me for an assassin, woman?” Laurentius asked, desperation turning his words into a whine.

“I take you for a worm. Answer me.”

“Who do you think? Of course it was Ilberd,” he snapped. “He insisted on doing it himself.”

Horror crawled slick and cold up Morgana’s spine—he merely confirmed what she’d always suspected, and still it was worse to know. She fought the impulse to turn to the wall and retch as her arms recalled the weight of Wilred’s corpse.

“Why?” she asked, her voice scraping.

“Because the boy was Ala Mhigan. ‘He deserves better than a butcher,’ he said—but do you know what I think? I think he liked getting his hands dirty,” Laurentius said, and for the first time, Morgana understood his own horror.

But in this, she knew Laurentius was wrong. Why was Ilberd under the old theatre and not in the cells beside his accomplices to swing with them on the Alliance’s gallows, if not for the same reason he had buried the blade between Wilred’s ribs?

They were Ala Mhigan. This was their way.

“But then,” and here Laurentius’ voice turned querulous with a high, fearful sort of laughter, “all those people at the Wall, what did they get, if not butchered? He went mad, I swear. Or maybe he always was and we didn’t see it. But he did.”

He had spent five years mad with grief, but the mask—the one he wore long before the Griffin first donned his armour—had kept it chained somewhere behind his ribs. Nidhogg’s eyes had merely broken them.

“If it was madness that made him give the orders, was it madness that made you follow them?” Morgana asked coldly.

Laurentius ran both hands through his hair, scratching his fingers on his scalp, his gestures heavy with guilt and defeat. The sight was enough to beg Morgana’s blade for a swift end without him even speaking the words, but pity didn’t belong inside her. He should crawl.

“Please,” Laurentius said quietly. He looked up at Morgana with eyes stripped of pride, and slid off the cot to lower himself to his knees in front of her. “Mercy. I’ve done a horrible wrong, I have—we have—but still I ask for mercy.”

She drew back, disgusted. The Butcher, nearly half his age, had not once begged for mercy in all the time she’d been in chains; neither had she begged for death. She had demanded it, tried to rip it out of their hands with her own eyeteeth rather than submit to anything but her own choices. A traitor and a murderer—the same as Laurentius—but prideful and stubborn, and above all, unafraid.

Laurentius had no rage. It made him weak.

“That mercy isn’t mine to give,” Morgana said, stepping back towards the open door. Her hand went to the doorway, grasping hard. She would have scratched grooves into it, had it been wood and had she the claws. “But neither is justice. Be glad you won’t learn how I deal it.”

She heard not the words Laurentius had for her, turning ugly with despair, as the cell closed heavily behind her; neither did she say anything else to the guard on her way out. Her steps faltered once the cool night air touched her face.

Wilred in her arms. She dragged her feet on the cobblestones, willed herself forward until she had turned into a dead end, and placed a palm on the wall in front of her to feel the smooth stone against her skin. Not the soaked blue coat, heavy with death. She breathed in shakily through her nose and out through her mouth. The boy was gone.

Had Ilberd shown him his face before sinking the knife into him? Morgana remembered Wilred’s unmarked shield; she had taken it to mean he’d never seen his killer. Perhaps it was merely his own death he hadn’t seen. Why should he have looked for a blade in the hand of his countryman and comrade?

For a moment, she thought she heard the boy’s voice on the wind, thick with pain and betrayal as he asked his captain _why_.

Morgana slammed the side of her fist into the wall and bit back a roar, then pushed herself off and back into the streets.

Sairsel was still out and about; she found him by chance with Arenvald, though she barely remembered her own intent to search for him.

“Boy,” she called at his back.

Both he and Arenvald turned.

Morgana stopped closer than either she or her son were comfortable with, and spoke with an uneven voice that sounded hard even to her own ears. “Keep what you’re about to hear to yourself,” she said to Arenvald—not worth pulling Sairsel aside when she knew this would be enough to ensure his discretion. Then, to her son: “In the north end of the merchant district, there’s an old theatre with a dome roof. Plague cross on the doors. I want you to meet me there in two bells’ time.”

“In the middle of the night?” Sairsel asked, glancing at Arenvald.

“You’re young. It won’t kill you to miss out on a bit of sleep,” Morgana said. “Two bells. Be there.”

Sairsel almost shrugged. He was a far cry from the boy who’d looked as though the desert might eat him alive when he’d surfaced in Little Ala Mhigo seeking her out—the boy to whom Wilred had taken like one might to a stray wandering into their garden. “Aye,” he said.

Nothing more and nothing less. He was his own man, now. Morgana nodded and walked past them without so much as a farewell, Arenvald’s hushed tones following at her back.

“Is she all right?”

“Bugger me if I know,” Sairsel mumbled.

Morgana met the unforgiving wind on the Lochs right out of Gylbarde’s Gate, stopping only to work a steadier breath into her lungs. She had no particular desire to see the Tomb of the Errant Sword again, now that she’d finally laid her brother’s spirit to rest where he belonged, but she couldn’t go back down to Wilred’s murderer without first paying her respects, and she had only given herself two hours. 

It would be a long walk to Bloodhowe—with the dead on her back, it always would be.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! 💚 you can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/vulpinewood) where i expose my pop culture references and post pictures of morgana arroway pining but like in a repressed way.


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